Horizontal Timeline

The plot of a story consists of events the recipient perceives sequentially, one after the other (with a few exceptions such as split-screen). Filmmakers especially are used to drawing a horizontal line to represent their plot, divided by vertical lines to show the act breaks. If you use index cards that stand for your scenes and pin them to a wall, you would naturally keep the line horizontal, with scene one to the left and the final scene to the right. The main reason not to do so is probably because you might run out of wall.

Software that features cork boards with virtual index cards invariably has the problem that it runs out of wall. The screen is never wide enough. So when the cards reach the right-hand border, the next ones appear in a new line below. This makes it harder to perceive the structure of the narrative.

Not so with Beemgee’s timeline. Our cards stay in a horizontal line.

You simply grab the timeline to move it left or right, which is less fiddly than with the bottom scroll bar. You change the size of the timeline with the zoom slider. It’s like stepping back from the wall a bit to get the bigger picture, or stepping up close to read the details on a single card.

The horizontal timeline also makes it easier to set the CHRONOLOGY of the event cards – drag and drop the events with the oldest to the left. Once you’ve done that, set the switch to NARRATIVE and arrange the events into the order you intend the recipients, your readers of viewers, to experience them. See the difference in the sort order immediately whenever you click the switch.

Enter DESCRIPTIONS for each of the events – probably best done while they are set to the NARRATIVE order. These texts are displayed as continuous copy in the STEP OUTLINE.

All the above is FREE.

If you’re a novelist, you might want to divide your narrative timeline into chapters. And what about those vertical lines that filmmakers like to draw? Well, sign up to PREMIUM and you get the magnificent benefit of being able to set STRUCTURE MARKERS in your timeline.